Quantopia - The Evolution of the Internet

“Quantopia” is a riff on “Quantified Utopia” - a remix of two powerful terms. Plato first conceived of Utopia in his opus The Republic as a Socratic dialog, one of the foundations of Western philosophy. Utopia has a root term in "topos" - same root for "topology" or landscape. A dialog is a conversation, and of course, the Internet and the Web are the biggest conversations humanity has ever had. I wanted to make an acoustic portrait of the sheer impact of the Internet on our society over the last 50 years, and explore in sound the fact that sound - like the fiber optic cables, satellite signals, wireless networks, and data centers that hold the modern world together - it's all about pattern recognition. 

We worked with Internet Archive's "WayBack Machine" to look for open source archival material to think of "DJ-ing the Web" based on open source/shareware as a core component of the cultural impact of the Web. The Archive is a way of engaging information overload by playing with fragments. We live in an era of the "Quantified Self" - a place where most aspects of contemporary life are informed by the invisible and deeply connected power of numeracy. But the idea of a civic society based on information even reflects some of the most powerful issues of digital governance. That's why I translated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into binary code, and had the chorus sing it. Like Plato once envisioned - society too is made of patterns. I wanted to explore the radical changes the Internet has unleashed in our time. This is just the beginning. 

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